Monday, March 03, 2008

MIMOA

MIMOA is an excellent online guide to European architecture. The site has already mapped over 1000 buildings and as anyone can add buildings, post comments and add ratings, the site is growing every day. That fact alone would make this a great site to visit but MIMOA has also included some great innovations in their use of Google Maps.

Favourites and I Was Here Feature

As you browse through the buildings featured in MIMOA you can add them to your favourites or you can add them to the list of buildings you have seen. Once you start tagging your favourites and the buildings you have visited these become options on the map. You can therefore create a map that only includes your favourites or a map that just includes the buildings you have visited. This is a feature I haven’t seen before in other Google Maps projects and is a great way to personalise the browsing experience.

MI Guides

I personally spend a lot of time video mapping London for my Virtual Tourism blog. So I thought I knew the city very well. However MIMOA has mapped a number of stunning buildings in London that I didn’t even know existed. I have just spent a very happy two hours creating a ‘MI Guide’, which will help me explore these buildings in person the next time it stops raining.

‘MI Guides’ are another great features of this site. As you browse the buildings in MIMOA you can add them to your guide and when finished print out a PDF of the guide. This feature is in beta testing at the moment but MIMOA promise that eventually the guides will include a map with a route of your choices.

MI Projects

The last important feature of MIMOA is that browsers can add their own ‘projects’ via an easy-to-use interactive form. This means that the number of buildings mapped at MIMOA will just grow and grow.______________